Maybe The FIA Should Go Away

It’s becoming clear that the FIA is becoming a liability to Formula 1.

It’s not necessarily the recent run of questionable stewarding or even more suspect calls from race control in the last month. Instead, it’s the internal processes that are changing within the FIA with the leadership decisions that have been made in the past few years.

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem was elected to his post at the end of 2021. At the time, Jean Todt was concluding his third term as president in an administration so quiet and uncontroversial that it’s just a three-sentence paragraph on his Wikipedia page.

Of course, looking under the surface, there were some questionable decisions in his final term. Namely, a controversial decision in early 2020 to “settle” with Ferrari regarding the team’s 2019 engine infringement.

The settlement has never been made public, which again was between the Todt-led FIA and the team/manufacturer he used to run and was deeply connected to for years.

In 2019, longtime F1 race director Charlie Whiting suddenly and unexpectedly died just a few days before the season. Michael Masi was named his replacement, a decision that saw compounded errors over time and ended in the embarrassment that was the end of the 2021 season.

Ben Sulayem based his candidacy on these in mind and ran as a champion of transparency with an eye towards advancing the Federation and motorsport in general in the future. He won and immediately set to work reforming F1 race control.

The reforms he put into place largely seemed to work. A two-person rotation for the race director role ended after the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, following a tractor driving onto the track and nearly hitting Sergio Perez in the chaos of a red flag period. But outside of that and what I thought was some very overly cautious calls on rain over the years, it seemed like the reforms were working.

The Brazilian GP from last month also proved to be a mess. But race director Niels Wittich got fired over it, at least according to him (the FIA maintains the split was “amicable”). That seems like a huge overreaction, especially as the season is closing out, and that a new race director could lead to instability and inconsistency on the levels we saw in Qatar this past weekend.

But that was just race control. Ben Sulayem has not been afraid of a microphone during his term, and it seems like his opinions will turn on a dime when he wants them to.

Ben…